One of the things I'm surprised your article doesn't mention is the tax advantages of this type of investment. The depreciation and rehab costs (purchasing distressed properties) can be huge deductions to ones income taxes, which none of the others have. Then, along with the appreciation of real estate, this passive income investment outperforms the notion of maxing out my 401k as well.
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Hello from the UK! Fundrise and Wealthfront are only available to US residents it seems :(. Any other readers from the UK here? The only thing I have managed to do from Sam’s list is getting a fixed rate bond (CBS is having a 5-year fixed rate at 2.01% – not great but the best I could find ). Don’t know if the FIRE movement will ever take off here but would love to trade tips/ideas on how to reach FI and have the freedom to consider alternative rythms to living.
Money from dividends, for example, are taxed at a lower rate than money from a job. A business owner who works in the company she or he founded would have to pay more self-employment payroll taxes compared to someone who merely had a passive interest in the same limited liability company who would pay only income taxes. In other words, the same income earned actively would be taxed at a higher rate than if it were earned passively.
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The previous blog post in this series noted that income (measured by labor market earnings) appeared to be 33 percent more persistent than wealth. In their Regional Economist article, Gayle and Hincapié also noted that “using one number to summarize the intergenerational persistence of earnings and wealth cannot answer whether such persistence is due to the inability of the poor to escape poverty or the persistence of wealth and income at the top.”
However, when you lack the money, you need time. You'll need to invest the upfront time now in order to reap the benefits of automatic income later. It just doesn't happen overnight. So don't expect it to. However, you can do this without quitting your day job. All it takes is some sincere effort over a consistent period, and voila! But, to get there, you'll need to consistently burn the midnight oil or get up at the crack of dawn. Your choice.

Successful YouTubers choose a theme for their channel—ranging from humorous commentary to gardening. As you acquire subscribers to your channel, your number of views becomes more consistent, which in turn grows your residual income. While you’ll need to produce regular videos to maintain your following, a couple hours of filming and editing pales in comparison to the revenue you can generate with minimum effort.

That strategy seems waaaayyyy less risky than actively picking stocks of supposedly “reliable” stocks that issue dividends, which could be cut at any time due to shifting industry trends and company performance. Dividend investing feels like an overly complex old-school way of investing that doesn’t have a very strong intellectual basis compared to index investing.
Managerial accounting defines residual income in a corporate setting as the amount of leftover operating profit after all costs of capital used to generate the revenues have been paid. It is also considered the company's net operating income or the amount of profit that exceed its required rate of return. Residual income is normally used to assess the performance of a capital investment, team, department or business unit.